Do not let updates hold you back from improving your blog
Through a website’s lifecycle there will be many updates, changes, themes and links that may change or affect the way the website ultimately functions. These probably seem more common now-a-days since the majority of people using blog platforms increases. From experience themes are the easiest item to install. Just download a theme and install it using a ftp site and then select it from the Presentation tab at the top of the Dashboard.
But unfortunately not all up dates are that easy. For instance, when we customized the urls on this site it affected how the navigation worked as well as links to internal blog postings. Those affects are actually still being felt around here as it takes time to locate and correct all the links.
A blogsite needs to function and be optimized from the very beginning and not be delayed by problems like: blogs on the homepage, dysfunctional contact form, no customized title tags and/or sub par navigation. Here is a quote from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines regarding the use of text versus images.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
Many updates are unavoidable and are necessary for the long-term success of a website. Browsing the blogosphere for a few minutes will produce a lot of website that are in desperate need of updates.
What a great lead into our next round of blog postings: how to customize a WordPress blog.
Becareful not to spam the people you are trying to target
The more time I spend moderating blogs, checking emails the more I reflect on: what drives people to try and spam their target audience with the hopes of increasing business? It is probably ignorance, relying on bad information and/or desperation that these tactics are used. A year back or so I was sending unsolicited emails to a target audience trying to recruit from the job pool and the responses I got ranged from “remove me from my list” to “I am happy where I am”.
So I got to thinking what could be done do to improve the conversion of the recruiting emails and then the light bulb went off; am I spamming my target audience and just annoying the target audience? The obvious conclusion was yes! From that time on I have not sent any unsolicited emails no matter how much the temptation was.
But spamming is not just limited to emails but takes another form on blogs and any blog knows what I am talking about; the bots that run automatic comments on blogs with the hopes of generating a backlink to increase their SEO. On an average day this blog receives 40 spam comments from programs that are looking to do this horrible tactic. It is a waste and an annoyance that is clogging the internet with a bunch of junk.
I have also seen spam commenting by individuals on their peer’s, or what could be determine to be their peers, website. Comments like “nice post”, “great information and “I am bookmarking and reread later” are spam comments in my opinion. These comments offer the author, readers and other blog participants any sort of value and are just used to get a link on another person’s website.
Blogging and commenting generates discussion which can sometimes out weigh the content in the original post. Discussion is what makes blogs valuable because of the thought provoking discussion that comes out of it. But not all blogs have to generate alot of discussion to have value. This blog does not do a lot of comments and that is perfectly ok with the owner, because that is not the goal of the site.
It may seem that we are stuck with email and comment spammers for ever but thank goodness that is not the case. Spam.Abuse.net is a website that is taking spam fight to the front lines with there Stop Spam on the Internet website.
Just be watchful of your actions and you should be ok. A simple question to ask yourself: is what I am about to do be construed as spam by a larger community? If you answer is yes or maybe then it is time to rethink the strategy.
Dilemma with good and bad linking tactics
Purchasing blog posts, from other website owners, has been looked at and evaluated by Google in recent SEO news, the Google Slap, and as a result many blogs devalued. The real estate industry was focused on quite heavily because competition in the real estate industry, between agents and offices, forced other to resort to paid tactics to generate higher link popularity, to gain strategic positioning on search engines, and as a result those sites were punished.
The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.
Unfortunately that is not the dilemma driving this post. Let us explore the blogger who has a client and needs to finds affordable link building strategies resulting in the blogger posting on social/professional networking site and strategically linking to said client. Is that a breach of blogging ethics or is it just good business?
My clients and myself are not people that are made of money and divulge in purchasing fist full of links from quality directories, like Yahoo’s, and sometimes more creative strategies have to be explored just to be competitive with others who may have those deep pockets.
To me this sounds like smart business tactics for the benefit of my clients.
PR Update or so it seems
I was reviewing my real estate website yesterday and noticed that the healthy PR 5 it had was reduced to a 4. Now that does not make me to happy since all the work went into rebuilding the site using a SEO friendly platform. The good news is that most off the interior pages received 2, 3 or a 4 with the update.
It is questionable if the update will stick but for the most part I believe that it will. So after thinking “why did the homepage PR drop?” I could only come up with a small theory (also I have not visited other marketing blog to see what they are saying yet).
After the website change over none of the interior pages had any PR and since the new web platform is more SEO friendly the PR 5 was disbursed throughout the site. This disbursement reduced the PR of the homepage but improved the sites overall PR and SEO strength.
I did noticed some of my friends blogs, one being a PR 6, were reduced as too…well I am off to see what others are saying.
301 Direct Files
I have recently redone a real estate website and one of the procedures was to create a 301 Redirect file to make sure old pages would be redirected to the new landing page. But there seems to be a problem when Google reads the 301 Redirect file as well as giving weight to the landing pages.
The new site has aggregated many pages and focused them onto new pages that were more focused and centralized for their terms. The idea was to have the new landing pages be indexed right away since there were links pointing them, either on the 301 Redirect file and through other web pages. But it didn’t work as expected and pages with 301s attached to them still have yet to be redirected.
The other side of the equation is having brand new pages that had no 301 Redirect attached to them. The main example was the blog page that the site now has. The blog page has no links, no pages that use its feed or any other internet marketing strategy applied to it.
Now my question is it worth it or even in a website’s best interest to deploy a 301 Redirect when launching a new website?
If brand new pages get indexed faster than ones attached to a 301 Redirect then why even build a 301 Redirect?
Okay that is two questions but the idea has some intriguing thought. Anyone else have experience using 301 directs and their effects on search engine rankings?